Flour Made From Insects Wins $1M For McGill Team

CBC

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A team of McGill University MBA students has won the $1 million Hult Prize for a project that aims to improve the availability of nutritious food to slum dwellers around the world by providing them with flour made from insects.

Mohammed Ashour, Shobhita Soor, Jesse Pearlstein, Zev Thompson and Gabe Mott were presented with the social entrepreneurship award and $1 million in seed capital by former U.S. president Bill Clinton in New York City Monday evening at the Clinton Global Initiative’s annual meeting.

The money will help them grow Aspire Food Group, an organization that will produce nutritious insect-based food products that will be accessible year-round to some of the world’s poorest city dwellers.

“We are farming insects and we’re grinding them into a fine powder and then we’re mixing it with locally appropriate flour to create what we call power flour,” Ashour explained to CBC News.

“It is essentially flour that is fortified with protein and iron obtained from locally appropriate insects.”

Protein and iron, the students noted, are nutrients in short supply in the diets of many people in developing nations, but found in high amounts in insects. For example, they note, crickets have a higher protein content per weight than beef.

Soor said people in many of the countries they are targeting already eat insects.

“There really isn’t a ‘yuck’ factor,” she added.

The type of insect would be chosen based on local culinary preferences.

“For example, in Mexico, we’d go with the grasshopper. In Ghana, we’d go with the palm weevil.”

The insects would be mixed with the most common type of local flour, whether it be made from corn, cassava, wheat or something else.

Ashour said his team has already held taste tests in some markets. In one test, they offered people tortillas made from regular corn flour, corn flour containing 10 per cent cricket flower and corn flour containing 30 per cent cricket flour.

“Amazingly enough, we got raving reviews for the latter two… so it turns out that people either find it to be tasting neutral or even better than products that are made with traditional corn flour.”

The team hopes to use the prize money to help them reach over 20 million people living in urban slums around the world by 2018.

The Hult Prize Foundation runs an annual contest open to teams of four or five students from colleges and universities to develop ideas for social enterprises — organizations that use market-based strategies to tackle social or environmental problems.

This year’s challenge, selected by Clinton, was to tackle world hunger.

Over 10,000 students entered, and the McGill team was one of six which reached the final stage, an opportunity to pitch their idea Monday to judges that included Clinton, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Muhammad Yunus and Erathrin Cousin, CEO of the World Food Program.

The $1 million is provided by the family of Swedish billionaire Bertil Hult, who made his fortune building the education company EF Education First, which runs language schools, high school programs, educational tours, cultural exchanges, and the Hult International Business School.